March 28, 2014 AT 1:32 pm

Pins are precious in the microcontroller world. How many times have you needed just one more pin? Sure, you could step up to a Mega and get a whole bunch more, but what if you really just need one or two? The DS2413 breakout board is the perfect solution. Each DS2413 breakout has 2 open drain GPIO pins and a 1-Wire interface. Just one of these boards will give you 2 pins for the price of one. But you can keep expanding from there.

You can put as many of these boards as you want on the the 1-wire bus and still control all of them with just one Arduino pin. Each chip has a 48-bit unique address, which means (in theory*) you could have as many as 2 * 2^48 pins controlled by just one Arduino pin! What could you control with 562 trillion pins?